When 17-year-old Henry Smith left Paris, Texas, after being questioned in the rape and murder of a white toddler, a railroad company offered free transportation to anyone who wanted to take part in the manhunt for him.
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The 1947 lynching of Willie Earle in Greenville, South Carolina, by some accounts the state’s last, was just like so many others.
On a late September night in 1919, about 100 Black farmers seeking fairer prices for their crops gathered for a union meeting at a church a few miles north of this tiny farm town.
It was a Sunday morning, July 12, 1914. The woman had been in the Elloree, South Carolina, jailhouse since the night before. Soon, a mob would come, put her in a waiting automobile, hang her from a tree and shoot her to death.
It was May 18, 1918, and Mary Turner was grieving. Her husband, Hayes Turner, had been lynched without a trial, accused of being an accomplice in the murder of a white farmer. Her unborn baby would be raised without a father. Infuriated by the injustice, she threatened to ask the courts to punish his killers.
White men bought ammunition and stopped at saloons on a hot summer day in 1910 in Slocum, Texas. They had sheltered their wives and children in churches and schools. They believed a racial revolt was underway.
In 1906, two of Atlanta’s most prominent newspapermen committed an act that many of today’s journalists would consider a sin: Hoke Smith, the publisher of The Atlanta Journal, and Clark Howell, the managing editor of The Atlanta Constitution, campaigned against each other for the governor’s seat in the Democratic primary.
On a typical day in downtown Annapolis, tourists fill the brightly adorned curio and clothing shops that line Main Street, squeezed in between fudge stores, seafood restaurants and other eateries.
Members of the Tallahassee Community Remembrance Project waited under the roof of a gray building where the Leon County Jail once stood, seeing if the rain would pass. They were among about 400 people who gathered in Cascades Park on July 17 to commemorate the deaths of four Black men who were taken from the Leon County Jail and lynched between 1897 and 1937. The area where the jail once stood is now occupied by a hotel, restaurants and apartments.
Holding 2-year-old Ransey in her arms, Annie Walker begged the Night Riders for mercy.
“Disregarding her pleadings, the infuriated mob opened fire and a bullet pierced the body of the infant. A second shot struck the mother in the abdomen and she fell, still holding the dead body of her infant,” the Public Ledger newspaper reported.
